Disability as identity

The disability rights and disability justice movements have articulated a position that many outside them find counterintuitive: that disability is not a tragedy to be overcome but an identity to be claimed, a way of being in the world that carries its own knowledge, culture, and community. The medical model treats disability as deviation from a norm to be corrected; the social model locates the problem not in the body but in the built environment and cultural attitudes that disable it. How a society treats disabled people reveals what it genuinely believes about whose lives have value.